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You are, of course, going to follow up this chart with a second one that comprehensively reflects the changes in State and Local taxes, especially including sales taxes, that have changed since 1950. And that data is going to include things like registration and usage fees, especially gasoline, telecommunications and sin taxes on things like liquor and cigarettes. I understand that is going to vary widely from state to state, so two, perhaps, should be instructive: say New York and California?

If someone wants to point me to a dataset which gives me that information, I’ll happily chart it. But in the meantime, I pulled table D1 (Californian GDP) and table M13 (Californian state tax collection) from the California statistical abstract. That only gives data from 1967 to 2007, unfortunately, and the GDP series changes slightly in 1997. But in any case, here’s the result:

It seems to me that tax revenues have been floating pretty steadily around roughly 5.5% of GDP since the mid-70s, with a brief blip up to a high of 6.8% during the dot-com bubble. I’m sure that the recession has brought the ratio down of late. But what I’m not seeing is any indication that the decline of federal tax revenues is made up for by a concomitant increase in state tax revenues.